


all that remains is the arms of the angels

by eynn



Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [4]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Found Family, Gen, Nobody Dies, Time Travel Fix-It, and the vod'e look out for each other, obi-wan gets a turn to yell at the council, this started out as crack and then took a hard detour into angst oh well, when they think the jedi are about to turn on them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:07:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24078715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eynn/pseuds/eynn
Summary: Mace gives into temptation and buries his face in his hands. Ki-Adi had had the bright idea to comm Obi-Wan since he was the more reasonable one of the duo and ask for some clarification.He’d been honestly shocked by how Obi-Wan looked when he answered the call. Exhausted, almost emaciated, his clothes rumpled and dirty like he had never dreamed of seeing on the usually tidy and put-together man. He was sprawled on an unmade bunk of some kind, a tiny child held to his chest, and glaring at them with a sulky resentment that only padawans let show on their faces.~Commander Grey’s fingers are still shaking as he brings up the comm channel that he was instructed to.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi (implied), Obi-Wan Kenobi & Anakin Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker
Series: had a dream, you and me in the war of the end times [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1713040
Comments: 59
Kudos: 1222





	all that remains is the arms of the angels

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Всё, что осталось у ангелов в руках](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29334669) by [Averin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Averin/pseuds/Averin)



Obi-Wan swears as the chirping of his comm startles him out of sleep. Last thing he remembered, Anakin was there too, and Padmé and Ahsoka, but now they’re all gone and the lights have switched to the day-cycle.

He frowns in confusion upon finding one of the twins sleeping on his chest. He has a vague recollection of Padmé asking him to let the kid sleep with him while she went with Anakin and took the other one, but he thought it was a dream at the time.

The child is tiny and is still covered in the Force. He observes its tiny mouth and nose and the wisps of sunlight hair, so like Anakin’s when he was young. He comes to the conclusions that it would have been a tragedy if the Order had prevented this little person from being born.

Thankfully, he’s spent just enough time on creche duty with babies, though none as young as this one, to know how to hold it as he groggily sits up, propping his back against the wall and Anakin’s one flat pillow, and scowls at his comm.

It hasn’t stopped beeping.

The baby starts to stir.

Obi-Wan absently bounces it a few times, sighing when it settles down to drool into his tunic, and answers the comm.

The holograms of the entire Council pop into being around him and he doesn’t bother to hold back a scowl. The thought of standing up as etiquette usually dictates doesn’t even cross his mind. 

These are his colleagues, and people he trusted at one point, but they’re also the people who let him run himself into the ground trying to take on more jobs than one person could ever handle and who drove his padawan into the arms of Darth Sidious with their needless suspicions and cruel exclusion.

“Master Kenobi,” Mace intones. “What is going on?”

Obi-Wan stares stonily back at the Council. He thought he would miss being on it, but now, looking at them, he finds he doesn’t miss the overwork and the responsibility one bit.

“We’re fucking leaving,” he says, and pats the baby’s back apologetically. He figures it’ll hear worse from its uncles, anyway.

Mace does a comical double-take and squints at him.

“Leaving the Order and the Republic,” Obi-Wan so helpfully clarifies. “It’s all pile of bantha shit at this point. I’m sure Anakin told you this.”

The baby, probably responding to his own increasing hostility and slight fear, begins to wail thinly, opening vivid blue eyes and staring at him helplessly. Obi-Wan sighs and bounces it some more in his arms, trying to soothe it.

“What’s that?” Kolar says.

“It’s a kriffing baby,” Obi-Wan snaps. “Force, haven’t any of you assholes ever seen one before? You woke it up. Now fuck off and let us go in peace. It’s not like anyone’s never gotten tired of the shit you hand out and left the Order before, why do you have to nag us about it at all hours?”

He pauses to add some reassurances to the unhappily flailing, crying child in his arms and then glares back at the staticky comm. He thinks someone said something while he was talking to the child, but he doesn’t remember what they said and he doesn’t care enough to ask for a repeat.

“I’m sure Anakin told you he has twins now. It’s not mine, good grief. We’d have to be on Kamino for that kind of technology –” He breaks off, a slight flicker of grief for the possibilities lost running through his head. Now that they’ve come back in time, the things that happened to draw him and his riduur together would probably never happen. He’d just have to set himself to be content with the memories, and not to be jealous of whoever he happened to pick in this timeline.

Obi-Wan looks down at his . . . niece? nephew? he’s not sure which it is, the aura of the pure Force is still overpowering everything individual about the child, and sighs. He has this, now – Anakin’s love back, and Padmé is healthy and alive, and their twins that are almost a miracle. He can do it.

“Obi-Wan!” The yell from Mace reminds him that he’s still on an open comm with the entire Jedi Council.

He looks up and glares at them. They flinch.

“What? We’ve resigned. End of discussion. Goodbye.”

He hits the button to turn the comm off a little harder than he really needs to and turns his attention to the baby. It’s far more important than those assholes back on Coruscant. And right after that is getting some more sleep.

Obi-Wan gives his long-distance comm a final poisonous glare and turns it off completely. He can find a short-range one for internal communication later and if someone really needs him, they can just come find him. It’s not like he’s going anywhere but back to sleep.

From the way the baby gurgles happily as he lies down again, it agrees with him.

~

Mace gives into temptation and buries his face in his hands. Ki-Adi had had the bright idea to comm Obi-Wan since he was the more reasonable one of the duo and ask for some clarification.

He’d been honestly shocked by how Obi-Wan looked when he answered the call. Exhausted, almost emaciated, his clothes rumpled and dirty like he had never dreamed of seeing on the usually tidy and put-together man. He was sprawled on an unmade bunk of some kind, a tiny child held to his chest, and glaring at them with a sulky resentment that only padawans let show on their faces. 

Except when he looked at the baby. Then he had shown only incredulity and contented absorption with its every move and sound.

And then he’d snapped at them in that same language that Skywalker used, not even seeming to hear them when they protested that they couldn’t understand him, and cut them off.

Depa sighs. “I suppose we’d better ask for another translation.”

“Perhaps we could write a translation program based on the one we already have,” Luminara suggests.

“That’d take too long,” Kit disagrees. He looks worried. “And your men are going to be in surgery soon, won’t they?”

Depa nods. “They’re almost ready for them. It can wait for a little while. Judging from his tone and expressions, he was saying much the same as Skywalker did.”

“Is the baby his?” Ki-Adi asks.

“Skywalker said he had twins,” Depa reminds them. “It’s got to be one of them.”

Mace grimaces behind his hands. Their two best generals definitely gone and with them two entire battalions. Three star destroyers. So much confidential knowledge about the war.

And Jabba the Hutt was insisting that the Jedi recover his kidnapped son, and none of them were anywhere near Tatooine except Kenobi and Skywalker. Well, clearly that wasn’t going to happen now.

How had they let it come to this?

~

Commander Grey’s fingers are still shaking as he brings up the comm channel that he was instructed to.

Commanders Wolffe and Thire and Fale and Fil show up on his left. Marshal Commanders Neyo and Bacara and Bly show up on his right. They all look at him expectantly.

“I could hear them,” he says. “It’s true. We’ve all got the chips, and they’re not happy about it. General Billaba volunteered us to be the first to be examined.”

“Us?” says Thire.

“Me. And my men. Her men.”

“What do they mean by examined?” Bly asks.

It’s a valid question. They’re slowly learning that not all words have the same definition as they did on Kamino, but sometimes words can also mean more than one thing.

“General Yoda said it was too dangerous for us to have chips. And that it was bad that we were ever commissioned.”

They all look at each other.

“Does that mean we’re going to be decommissioned, then?” Fil asks. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Wolffe snaps. “Who’s going to fight the clankers for them if we’re not there?”

“Uh, General Skywalker gave them the idea to fight using viruses in the software,” Grey says. “They’re going to switch to doing that from what I heard.”

There’s a heavy silence.

“And they’re comming General Kenobi now. I think they wanted to ask him more about us. He probably knows how far we’re compromised.”

“General Skywalker did say he’d find us if we really needed him,” Bly ventures. “And he speaks our language.”

“He does,” Neyo agrees. “Surely we wouldn’t have taught him if he wasn’t a brother too.”

“What about General Kenobi, though?” Bacara asks.

Neyo shrugs. “The 212th seem happy with him. Ghost especially. They wouldn’t trust him without reason.”

Bly snorts. “That just because Cody’s –”

“Oh, like you have room to talk.”

Bly glares at Neyo.

Thire clears his throat and looks over his shoulder before speaking. “There are so many ships in the Coruscant docks. We look after them.”

“How fast could we get everyone on them and out?”

Thire shrugs. “The only trouble would be waiting for the brothers who clear them for takeoff. Maybe an hour, tops. It’s not like we have much to take with us. The ships are kept loaded with food and ammunition.”

“We’d need more than just for a campaign,” Bacara argues.

“Then we take all we can with us. Grab it on our way out. If everyone takes as much as they can carry from the warehouses, we’d be set for months.”

They look at each other again.

Grey is batchmates with Thire, and Wolffe and Fil and Fale. He’s next-batchmates with the others. And he’s batchmates with Rex, who apparently has enough trust in General Skywalker to, at some point, have taught him to speak their language, and with Cody, whose adamant stand that his general is a good person is not to be ignored.

“We should do it,” Wolffe says harshly. “I trust General Koon, but I don’t trust the rest not to speak over him.”

“I . . . wish I could trust General Secura,” says Bly, the tips of his ears flushing. 

It’s a sign of how rattled they are that nobody teases him about it.

“I’ll have some of mine let you out,” Grey says, each word heavy.

“You’re coming too,” Thire says.

Grey shakes his head. “General Billaba wants to start with us. If we aren’t there, she’ll know something’s up.” He tries to smile at his brothers. “It’s fine.”

“Grey –”

“No,” he hisses. “This has got to work. It’ll be fine. You get out of here and start figuring out how we can get the chips out of us. If we can do that, there’ll be no reason for them to decommission us because we won’t be a security threat. I can probably hold her off until the end of the day, but no longer. You have to get out now.”

“We can manage,” Thire says hesitantly.

“We’ll have to get totally out of Republic space,” Neyo says. “Since the Chancellor is a Sith Lord and he wants to use us.”

They exchange worried looks. The Jedi don’t seem to have realized that the Chancellor is the one holding the detonator for their chips, but it’s the only logical choice.

“We can do that easily enough,” Bacara dismisses. “So, Grey gets us out, we run for it, the medics get us dechipped as fast as possible so they can’t be used to bring us back.”

“How do we know they don’t have a distance trigger?” Fale says.

“How’d they even judge that? Nobody knows the next place the clankers are going to start a fight on. It can’t be based on proximity to a General because they don’t know about it and they’d have to have some kind of tracking implant for ours to ping off of. Plus, that would go wrong far too easily. It’s got to be remotely triggered by something.”

“We should ditch all comms as soon as we leave,” Wolffe says. “Too dangerous. And go through everything – ships, armor, weapons, food, all systems – for tracking beacons. And we should use the nav computers only if there’s no other choice. What? We’re kriffing smart. We built those damn ships. We sat through all those classes. We can do it.”

“Fair enough,” says Bacara. “So. Grey. Are you sure --?”

“I can do it,” he says, and maybe he’s crying again, but he’s scared, and it’s not like the others aren’t. They’re all scared. They’ve all lost at least one batchmate to decommissioning. The hurt never really goes away.

“Right,” says Neyo, visibly breathing in and out, straightening his shoulders. “We’ll get the brothers ready to march with a minute’s notice. You get some of yours up to those control towers to let us out. And we’ll spread the word as we go to see if the ones out in the field want to join us.”

“Jate’kara,” Grey says, because he doesn’t think he can say more.

“Ret’urcye mhi,” they respond, in a ragged chorus, and one by one sign out of the group comm.

Neyo is the last left, and Grey is about to shut his own comm off when he speaks.

“We won’t forget you, Gre’ika,” he says. “None of you.”

He manages a nod. “We’ll look after you,” he says, and knows that Neyo understands that he means both in this life and after.

~

It’s time.

CC-10/994 leads his men into the Temple and meets his General where he was ordered to, at the entrance to the healing wing.

Well, not all of his men. He sent the youngest, the shinies that really aren’t even old enough to be leaving Kamino, with two of the experienced techs who can show them how to let the ships carrying their brothers out and scramble all the trackers they can. They’ll take a shuttle and board Neyo’s ship as quickly as they can. They might not make it, but it’s more of a chance than they’d have here.

General Billaba hasn’t seen the shinies yet. She might not even know they were supposed to be there.

Grey stands at attention and his men follow his example. She comes out of the doors to meet them.

“Commander,” she says. “I’m so glad you could make time for this on such short notice.”

“Sir,” he answers, when she seems to want a response.

It’s been barely six hours since the Jedi heard General Skywalker’s message. 

It’s been twenty minutes since he got the message from Thire that the evacuation of the brothers from Coruscant had gone smoothly. They’ll be in hyperspace now.

“Well, come in,” she says, holding the door open. “We can only do a few of you at a time, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait out here.”

He raises his chin a little more and steps forward, and the first in line follow him.

At least he knows now that this wasn’t the plan for them all along, not from the Jedi, anyway. They’re horribly unprepared for this kind of mass decommissioning. If they wanted to, they could probably fight their way out and even make it. Not like Kamino.

But they need to keep them occupied, keep them thinking their plans were working. So Grey lets one of the Jedi healers take his arm and lead him to a bed, lets them arrange him and come close to him and inject the poison into his arm.

It’s kind of them to let him lay down, rather than just collapse on the floor.

The last thing he sees as his vision goes dark is the strangely worried face of his General.

**Author's Note:**

> alright, i've had the last two bits of this written for like a week but i could not figure out the beginning until Fai_Gensou turned up with Ideas
> 
> no feedback or ideas are too dumb or tiny to be inspiring!


End file.
